## Metadata - Author: [[Raymond Geuss]] - Full Title: Changing the Subject - Category: #books ## Highlights - Just as all singers want to be excellent singers—otherwise why would they sing?—and all potters want to make good pots, so all humans want to be living a good life, that is, to be excellent human beings. Differences are the result of the presence or absence of knowledge about how to attain this goal. Socrates is looking for this form of knowledge. But is it actually true that all singers want to be excellent singers? Might I not want to sing for all sorts of other good reasons? If that seems implausible, is it also obvious that all humans want to be excellent humans? This simply attributes to everyone without much argumentation the specific agonistic code of ancient freemen (and ancient aristocrats). What about the possibility, developed later by Hobbes, that what people want is not to be excellent but to survive, which is a completely different thing? ([Location 669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=669)) - ‘Unexamined’ has an odd structure when used by Socrates. We generally think of an examination as something with a definite beginning and an end, something that comes to some kind of conclusion. Examining is usually a matter of standing back and asking questions; then, when I have come to some conclusion, I may continue to act. However, for Socrates the examined life is not a life that is examined but a life spent in examining. What would an unending examination be? Socrates’ unclarity about the exact relation of thought and action, of which this is an instance, has dogged the history of philosophy ever since. ([Location 760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=760)) - These rituals may have special standing in giving a group a sense of identity; they may foster community spirit; they may increase solidarity; and they may be thought to confer innumerable other benefits, such as calming people down or providing a protected, nonutilitarian space for general reflection in overly busy human lives. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=1606)) - Plato’s main obsession is that humans are fundamentally speaking, conceptualising, and reasoning beings—that this is the most important thing about them and the faculty that must, before others, be cultivated, developed, and refined. But both Augustine and Nietzsche would agree that this is an exceedingly shallow and superficial way to think about people. For Nietzsche, human impulse, drive, and desire and the human preconceptual image-making capacity are much more fundamental and important than concepts or reasons, and for Augustine, man is a creature not of ratiocination but of love. Augustine’s way of putting Nietzsche’s point would be that Plato tries to get people to give priority to a certain form of ‘reasoning’ by getting them to love (the image of) Socrates. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=1784)) - In reading the works of a thinker, even one who, like Montaigne, very definitely did not present himself as a systematic philosopher, it is almost always useful to try to distinguish between what one might call the ‘weight-bearing’ concepts—the ones that are in constant and central use and play an important role in allowing the flow of thought to proceed—and other concepts that are merely decorative, rhetorical, or gestural, part of the established decor, historical reminiscence, colloquial façons de parler that are not to be taken too seriously, accepted pieties that have to be repeated for one (usually political or religious) reason or other, or window dressing. ([Location 2253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=2253)) - For Montaigne, friendship is a central model for a wide variety of human phenomena. My friends may surprise me, and often when I am able to predict how they will judge a situation or what they will do, I can’t specify any reasons for this prediction that would stand up to scrutiny. To ‘get on with’ them implies also that I will be able to continue to live my life and manage my relations with them even when they change (as people do). It is also the case that one can get on with lots of people whose specific beliefs, both about the world and about how we should act in it, are radically different from one’s own. Human collective life would be impossible if that were not so. This is why one should be careful in putting too much emphasis on the role of the dangerously ambiguous word ‘consensus’ in thinking about human society. ([Location 2289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=2289)) - As an opponent of the ideal of authenticity, Nietzsche is positively disposed to the wearing of masks. Any form of unity is, after all, the result of a conscious shaping of self, and thus a kind of mask. ([Location 3158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=3158)) - A philosopher is not someone who will ‘get to the bottom of things once and for all’ but someone who will be able to see the things in the world from a variety of different points of view or perspectives at the same time without getting confused. ([Location 3166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=3166)) - Nietzsche holds that if God were to exist, he would not, contrary to eighteenth-century views, be a master geometer with a universal system of the world. He would see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows. ([Location 3225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=3225)) - As societies become more complex and it becomes advantageous to be able to be responsive to a variety of different environments, they also tend to develop forms of knowledge that may permit a few favoured individuals or groups to get some cognitive distance from the immediate realities of their given situation and their inherited forms of interaction. Some forms of knowledge develop which contain a self-reflective and even critical potential. Philosophy generally aspires to be one of the more generalising and self-reflective parts of the cognitive and ideational apparatus of a society, but it has an uphill battle against both the sheer inertial weight of the past and the teleological shaping of existing cognitive tools to operate best when they are helping to grease the wheels of social reproduction. ([Location 3284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=3284)) - it is an important constituent of what it is to be human that we have the power to ‘abstract’, to focus on some aspects of the world while ignoring others, and in principle we can ‘abstract’ in an indefinite number of ways. ([Location 3309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=3309)) - the cadence of plausibility, ([Location 3325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=3325)) - Shortly after his death, in 1951, some of his students published the Philosophical Investigations, a text he had been working on for several years. In this text Wittgenstein clearly and explicitly rejects as completely wrong his own earlier view that the essential nature of language is to be a picture or model of a world. He also rejects the metaphysics of facts which, according to the Tractatus, constitutes the structure of the world. Instead, he construes language use not as the holding up of a mirror to the world but as a (collection of different) form(s) of social action. ([Location 4116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=4116)) - It is one of Adorno’s contentions that society always tries to make an indeterminate world determinate. That is part of what societies do, and it is not in itself a bad thing. However, our society is set up so as to reduce uncertainty and indeterminateness by ruthlessly suppressing alternatives (and that means even the human capacity to envisage alternatives). Another aspect of this is that our societies try to ensure that nothing new ever happens in them, that no novelty can emerge. The best way to do this turns out to be by the constant generation of pseudo-novelty: there is always a new film in the cinemas (but the plot, characters, and style always follow one of a small group of existing recognisable patterns). ([Location 4644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=4644)) - The men of the Reformation burned as many heretics as Catholics did and were deeply implicated in the construction of a disenchanted world view which encouraged us to treat our environment simply as material to be exploited, one of the consequences of which is the ecological catastrophe we now face. ([Location 4681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0769CLL8J&location=4681))